Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art

In 1915, a leading American paleontologist embarked on a revelatory journey through the cave-studded hills of southern France, guided by the very archaeologists who were rewriting human history. Henry Fairfield Osborn walked the sites where mammoth hunters had lived 25,000 years earlier, where artists had painted the walls of Lascaux, and where the deepest layers of human habitation stretched back an almost incomprehensible 100,000 years. This book is the record of that expedition, a meticulous synthesis of geology, paleontology, and archaeology that attempted to reconstruct the lives of our ancestors when Europe was a colder, stranger place teeming with creatures that no longer exist.Osborn writes with the兴奋 of discovery, conveying the profound shock of realizing that intelligent beings with minds like our own, yet unformed by education or tradition, had built communities, created art, and mastered their environment far longer ago than any civilization we traditionally study. In contrast to Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Greece, he argues, this corner of France represents something far older and more fundamental: the unbroken birthplace of human culture itself.For readers who want to understand not just what we have learned about human origins, but how we first began to learn it, this volume remains a fascinating window into the birth of modern paleoanthropology.